Types of Computer Hardware

Computer hardware is a physical part of a computer that executes within the hardware. It is unlike computer software or data that can be frequently changed, modified or erased on a computer. Computer hardware is not frequently changed and so is stored in hardware devices such as read only memory (ROM) where it is not readily changed.

Most computer hardware is embedded and so is not visible to normal users. Below are the different types of hardware's found in a computer:

• Motherboard: It is the central or primary circuit board making up a complex electronic system such as a computer. A motherboard is also known as a main board, logic board or system board.
• Central processing Unit: A CPU is the main component of a digital computer that interprets instructions and process data in computer programs.
• Random Access Memory: A RAM allows the stored data to be accessed in any order. RAM is considered as the main memory of the computer where the working area is used for displaying and manipulating data.
• Basic Input Output System: BIOS prepares the software programs to load, execute and control the computer.
• Power Supply: Power Supply supplies electrical energy to an output load or group of loads.
• Video Display Controller: It converts the logical representation of visual information into a signal that can be used as input for a display medium.
• Computer Bus: It is used to transfer data or power between computer components inside a computer or between computers.
• CD-ROM drive: It contains data accessible by a computer
• Floppy disk: It is a data storage device
• Zip Drive: It is a medium capacity removable disk storage system.
• Hard Disk: It is a non-volatile data storage system that stores data on a magnetic surface layered unto hard disk platters.

Author: Isabella Rodrigues

Read More

Buy Quality Computer Hardware Online

Computer hardware means the physical part of a computer. No software or program can do anything without proper hardware. Moreover the success or performance of a software program depends completely on the computer hardware being used. So it becomes absolutely important that we buy quality computer hardware.

Now that you have decided to buy computer parts, the next big step is where to buy them from. One tends to always buy from a friendly neighborhood computer hardware dealer. But, with the advent of Internet, one has the convenience of going through literally hundreds of product catalogs and arriving at a purchasing decision.

The Internet is a popular place to check out computer hardware sales, but you must be sure that when you buy hardware (or any purchase) over the Internet, the site offers some kind of security to prevent information about you from being stolen.

Buying a computer part online is often cheaper than buying it from a dealer, as the overhead costs are reduced. This means that you pay less and get more. This is one advantage that has led people in increasing numbers to shop for parts online, especially from a wholesaler. Since the entire sales channel is literally cut in half, you do not pay for the extra margin, which you would have had you purchased the same from a retailer. There is also the convenience factor of shopping online.

In fact, cheap and discount computer hardware is very easy to find online. Whether it is notebook parts, input devices, printer, printer supplies you can find them extensively advertised and sold online.

One should always take care to ensure that the parts that one is buying are genuine. What this means is that one should always buy these computer hardware from a reputed online dealer.

Author: Mike Nicholson
Computer hardware UK offers quality computer hardware online:

Read More

Overclock Your Computer

There are two schools of thought as to why you can, or would even want to overclock most CPUs and GPUs. One of them takes the peace, love and understanding route, namely that the manufacturing process is never 100 per cent reliable, so not every chip that rolls off the same production line is born equal. Those with the most lustrous coats and shiniest eyes (bred on Pedigree, presumably) are ready to be high-end components, but those with a bit of a squint and a runny nose may have a funny turn if they exert themselves too much.

Hence, some chips are slapped with a lower official clock-speed and sold for less groats than their beefier brethren. The potential for their intended glory remains, however. Overclocking techniques can unlock at least some of that potential, albeit at the risk of frying the chip completely.

The tinfoil hat/Angry Internet Men theory is based on the same concept but chucks in a bit of paranoia. In this scenario, every same-series processor is born equal, but The Man artificially neuters most of them and slaps different badges on what are fundamentally the same chips. Overclocking, then, is simply a way of taking back what's rightfully yours.

The truth likely lies somewhere between the two. Mass production certainly makes more financial sense than dozens of separate lines, and it's true that a low-end CPU or GPU can be made to punch far above its weight, but their stability isn't as guaranteed as a chip that's officially able to run at a higher speed. No manufacturer wants to deal with a steady trickle of returned parts, after all. But it does mean home overclocking is almost always productive - and seemingly more so with every new hardware generation.

It's also increasingly easy. The earliest overclocking on the 4 to 10MHz 8088-based CPUs of 1983, involved desoldering a clock crystal from the motherboard and replacing it with a third-party one, with only partially successful results. Ouch. Still, the precedent was set: a dedicated guy-at-home could exceed his chip's official spec. IBM, then very much the top dog of PC land, wasn't entirely happy about this, so follow-up hardware included hard-wired overclock blocks.

More soldering this time of a BIOS chip, managed to get around this. By 1986 IBM's stranglehold had been broken, resulting in a raft of 'clone' systems - and a wealth of choice. Intel's 286 and 386 processors became the de facto standard chips, and bus speed and voltage controls began to shift from physical switches and jumpers to BIOS options and settings.

It was the 486 that really changed everything however. It's telling that this was the chip most prevalent during the era that birthed the first-person shooter as we know it: 1993's Doom very much popularized performance PCs for gaming driving system upgrades in the same way a Half-Life 2 or Crysis does these days. At the same time, the 486 introduced two concepts absolutely crucial to overclocking both then and now. Firstly, it popularized split product lines; no longer was it a matter of buying simply a processor, but rather which processor. The 486SX and DX offered some serious performance differential, and notably the SXs were hobbled/failed DXs, giving rise to the ongoing practice of assigning different speeds and names to what were the same chip.

For a while too, the 25MHz SXes could be overclocked to 33MHz by adjusting a jumper on the motherboard; something less salubrious retailers took full advantage of. Secondly, it introduced the multiplier: performing more clocks per every one mustered by the system's front side bus. The 486's 2x multiplier thus effectively doubled the bus frequency. This was something overclockers would make the best of for successive processor generations - bumping up the multiplier was the simplest and often most effective way of increasing CPU speed. Nowadays (since the Pentium II, in fact), the multiplier is locked to prevent this, save for high-end chips, such as Intel's Extreme Edition series. For a while, there were complicated ways of defeating the multiplier lock: soldering on a PCB for earlier chips, third-party add-ons and the infamous practice of drawing a line onto certain AMD CPUs with a pencil. No CPU manufacturer's likely to make that mistake again.

Around this time, RAM overclocking became more common place, as memory speeds were ratified, and with that came more tweaking of the front-side bus to compensate for the locked multipliers. Overclocking shifted further towards the BIOS and away from jumpers, which in turn led to overclocking software.

The first was 1998's SoftFSB, which enabled bus-tweaking from within Windows for the first time. With the Pentium III era came aftermarket coolers, as processors now chucked out so much heat that a standard cooling block and fan wasn't enough to cope with an overclocked chip. And so it continued, overclocking largely becoming easier and more common place with each processor generation. This leads us to the Core 2 chips of today, and Intel's current terrifyingly unassailable dominance of the CPU market. Generally drawing as little as half the power of the Pentium 4s that preceded them, most of the range offers a vast amount of overclocking headroom, to the point that a low-end Core 2 Duo can almost go toe-to-toe with the top of the line.

So how's it done? Key to processor overclocking is the front side bus (FSB). In the very simplest terms, this is the connection between the CPU and the rest of the PC, and its speed defines the processor's speed to a significant extent. Intel CPUs final speed is the FSB times the multiplier - so if you've got an FSB of 266MHz and a multiplier of 9, your chip will run at approximately 2.4GHz. While the multiplier is usually locked - though some chips let you at least lower it, to conserve power and reduce heat - the FSB isn't. Bump up the FSB and you bump up the chip. In our example taking the bus to 290MHz gives us a 2.6GHz processor. This is no random example, incidentally, it's what we run the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 in one of our office test systems at, giving it a healthy 200MHz boost that makes a noticeable difference in CPU-intesive games and hi-def video re-encodes.

What stops us from going higher? Not a lot in the case of this particular chip. We're playing it safe for desktop work, cos we're in a particularly sweaty office. When we're playing around with high-end tasks, we can have it running stably at over 33GHz (with an FSB of 370 or so) on a decentish, third-party air cooler. That's more or less trading blows with the best Intel has to offer on a $200 chip. But while going to 280MHz on the FSB took a BIOS tweak, a reboot and Microsoft BOB's your uncle, going much higher does involve more fuss.

First up, when our Q6600 is at 33GHz, it's also running at nearly 70°C when under maximum load (and around 50°C when idling). It's perfectly stable, but it could damage it in the long run, and on top of that the fan is making enough noise to wake the deaf pensioner in the next street over. Watercooling, a fancier air-cooler or even just a spot of dust-cleaning will bring the heat down, but there can come a point where that stuff becomes more expensive and hassle than simply buying a better processor.

Hurdle the second is the motherboard. Pushing up the FSB doesn't affect only the CPU, but also the motherboard and, in many cases, the RAM and PCI-e slot to boot. In our case, we're using a motherboard that supports a monstrously high FSB. When shopping for a motherboard, its max FSB will usually be referred to as four times the actual speed, due to the way the processor actually fetches data. So when we've got the FSB set to 266MHz, in effect that's 1,066MHz. When it's up to 372MHz, we need a motherboard that's happy at nearly 1,500MHz. That simply isn't a given, especially on cheaper boards, so shop carefully.

As well as that, if you've got a board with a stingy BIOS, you may not be able to alter RAM and PCI timings independently of the FSB, which can lead to those falling over. Ours does, and for our mighty near-Gigahertz Q6600 overclock, we have to lower the RAM's clock speed a little to compensate for the strain put on it by the raised FSB - we have it sitting pretty at 893MHz. It could comfortably go higher, but the real-world benefits (as opposed to the willy-waving benefits, which are a different matter entirely) would be so miniscule that it's simply not worth placing the extra pressure on the RAM.

Similarly, while faster and, most likely, more expensive RAM will cope better at their stock speeds with a massive FSB, the pay-off is often so minor that value RAM, running at a lower clock-speed may well be enough to make your overclocking masterplan hugely successful. Even the best memory will net you something in the region of just a five per cent performance boost - worth having if every little helps, but it's the FSB that makes the big difference. And for that, the motherboard is critical.

Thirdly, there's the matter of voltage. The faster your chip runs, the more power it needs to feed it. As the FSB goes up, you'll find your motherboard's North Bridge and your RAM also get hungrier.

Unfortunately, your hardware will automatically report its revised power requirements, so trial and miserable error are required to find the sweet spot. Volt tweaking is a fiddly and danger-fraught business.

Some overclocking-friendly motherboards can automatically adjust voltages for you, but are understandably conservative about it, so for the really big overclocks you'll need to set them yourself. This needs to be done by the tiniest increments possible, establishing reboot-by-reboot how many volts your embiggened CPU needs; as low as possible, essentially, as firing too many into it can fry it.

Establish in advance what your chip's out-of-the-box volts are and, through a mix of common sense and googling, decide on a number you're not going to risk going higher than. We pushed our Q6600 from 13 to 1.4V, which is a fairly big increase as volt modding goes. It's not just a matter of the so-called vCore either - as you go for the big overclocks, you'll find you're having to play with the arcane likes of CPU PLL and FSB termination voltage. Again, so long as you raise stuff in tiny increments the risk of killing your chip, RAM or motherboard is fairly minimal.

It's a different matter with AMD processors, which for a while now have had an onboard memory controller, which allows the chip to communicate more directly with the RAM, which in turn means there isn't an FSB as such. Instead, you're overclocking something known as the HyperTransport bus, which is achieved in more or less the same way, but can require lowering the NT's own multiplier to retain stability when you bump the speed. If you've gone for one of the recent AMD Phenom Black Editions, you'll find it comes with the multiplier unlocked, which makes overclocking an easier affair.

By contrast, overclocking a graphics card is dead simple. As a more self-contained piece of hardware, there's none of this confusing multiplier or FSB business; just overclocking the card itself, finding the right speeds for both the GPU and the card's onboard memory. Free software - some of it official NVIDIA/ATI driver plug-ins - will do the trick from within Windows, and built-in safety cut-offs and stability tests make it incredibly hard to damage the card, though of course you are going beyond the warranty.

It's also grown a little more complicated of late in that you may need to overclock the shader clock as well as the GPU and RAM for the best boosts. In the case of NVIDIA cards, it used to be that this was twinned to the GPU speed, meaning a raise in one had a synchronous effect on the other, but for a little while now they've been able to be altered independently. So if you hit the speed ceiling on the GPU, it may yet be possible to eke more performance out of the card by pushing the shader clock a little further.

While the present situation is that you can overclock everything and be pretty confident it'll work, the future of the form is harder to call. One thing seems sure: it's not a dirty little nerdy secret anymore, but an increasingly common practice, most especially with Core 2 chips. There's a vast aftermarket cooler industry to support it, and even cheap motherboards can handle a bit of a free boost. If anything overclocking will become easier, with more and better applications to achieve it within Windows, rather than from the BIOS, and possibly more in the way of automatic volt-modding. But much depends on the future of desktop processing. There's a big war brewing between Intel and NVIDIA as to whether the CPU or the GPU will be the major element in the PC of the near-future.

Intel are pushing ray-tracing using a multi-core CPU to render game graphics, while NVIDIA's CUDA enables its recent GeForce cards to perform parallel processing, such as video encoding and in-game physics, far faster than a CPU could manage. If either of these bed in, overclocking will need to take them into account. At the same time, the slow move to ever-more cores potentially reduces the need for conventional overclocking, as raw clock speed continues to be a lesser concern to multi-threading and, in the case of 3D cards, the number of stream processors and texture units. That's hardly going to stop anyone from trying it, of course. Even when its effects are minimal, overclocking's always going to be a sure-fire way of making a system feel like its yours rather than simply a collection of mass-produced parts.

Modding the case is one thing, but what makes a PC is its performance. When you've painstakingly tweaked that performance into something that suits your own purposes, and it's become something that feels like you've gone far beyond what you paid for it, the system will feel more unique than all the green neon tubing in the world could ever hope to achieve.

Author:
Sandra Prior’s

website:
http://usacomputers.rr.nu
http://sacomputers.rr.nu.

Other Tips and Tricks

Read More

Driver for Windows Vista

Windows Vista is Microsoft’s new generation of graphical operating systems used on personal computers. It is designed to host both managed and native applications on a productive and secure platform. Compared to its predecessor Windows XP, Vista has numerous new and reworked features which make it more reliable, secure, and powerful.

Windows Vista does not use drivers that the user specifies during installation for the storage device. Since Windows Vista does not support a number of older hardware and software, it generally requires an update or new driver to operate smoothly and efficiently.

As far as Window Vista installation is concerned, it can be done with the help of a Windows Vista installation disc. While installing this operating system, the user requires using advanced settings in the Window Vista Setup to specify the storage device driver.

The storage driver which the user specifies during Windows Vista installation is loaded during the overall scenario. It only supports the drivers present in its installation disc.

Storage device features for the driver that the user specifies while installing the operating system are not available in Windows Vista. It will not show them even though Vista appears to use the .inf file which matches to the storage device driver the user specifies during installation.

To resolve the problem, the user requires loading the specific driver again. Outlined below are the required steps to complete the task:


* Insert the Windows Vista Installation Disc into the CD/DVD drive.


* Reboot the computer from the installation disc.


* Insert the media which has the new storage device driver.


* Configure the Windows Vista Setup program using the advanced settings.


Note: The user needs to click Load Driver to load the particular driver from the media. This will configure the Windows Vista Setup Program to use the specific driver.

Indeed, the drivers implemented for Microsoft Windows XP and Microsoft Windows Server 2003 may lead to technical default in Microsoft Windows Vista operating system. This is why when it comes to reliability of the Windows Operating System, the Microsoft is always the brunt of much criticism.

Author : K.P.Pandey

Read More